Engineer Manager Jira Software, Atlassian, Nick Pellow

My guest today is a computer engineer that has not only worked for Australias biggest IT company (Atlassian) and for the Eurovision Song Contest. He also sold an online business to David Jones. Nick Pellow.

My guest is someone that has worked in some of the most exciting IT projects. Not only was he responsible for creating the first text tally system for the Euro Vision Song contest voting system, but he now manages the most important product of Atlassian (one of the biggest and most important IT businesses in Australia). My guest today is Nick Pellow.

He was responsible for creating the first tally system based on mobile texts for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Nick Pellow was one of the first employees at Australias Enterprise software company, Atlassian. As you will hear in this interview Nick Graduated from the Sydney Uni Computer Science program, started a company while at uni that went on to be sold to David Jones before the dot com boom. He then went to Europe and lived in France and Germany. This is where he worked on the company that created the first text tallied system for the Euro Vision Song contest (yes, I know!). He then came back to Sydney to work again with his mates. This is when they got bought by Atlassian, starting his more than a decade journey with them. He is now head Engineer for Jira which is Atlassian’s best selling product and Nick id responsible for managing more than 50 people among other things.

In this interview, you will learn what Nick looks for when hiring people, what he believes happiness is, and the morning routine he followed for years to give his days a positive head start.
Even if you are not a computer science or IT graduate or professional you will find his story interesting. It has certainly not been easy and a lot of hard work along the way.

If you have not heard about Attlasian it is by far the biggest and most important Australian IT Company. it is basically a fairy tale startup and one of the very few Australian “unicorn” companies that now employees several thousands of people and has headquarters in different locations around the world. Atlassian’s core product is Jira, a project management and bug tracking tool that is now considered global standard within enterprises. It has more than 50,000 customers around the world that range from small companies to well-known companies like NASA, Netflix, Skype, BMW, PayPal and Nike among many others. It was a pleasure talking to Nick and how he is ensuring world-class quality for a product that is used by so many!

Enjoy the interview and leave your comments below if you would like to know something else about this particular line of work.

In this episode you will learn why Nick’s passion is computer science, the traits he looks for when hiring new staff, what he things are the most important issues people need to tackle when starting their career, and his top tips for people starting their careers and that just graduated from university.